Rodger Lea

Currently Chief Scientists of an IoT focused startup, Sense Tecnic Systems Inc, Dr. Lea brings to bear over 20 years experience in industrial research at companies such as Sony and HP. He's passionate about new technologies, Smart Cities and building thriving innovation ecosystems. Follow him on twitter @rodgerlea

While the majority of Smart City applications can be developed and deployed using traditional approaches, researchers are investigating how a new class of large scale, dynamic applications can leverage the power of Fog Computing, to build and deploy applications that are distributed throughout the smart city running on a variety of devices ranging from city servers, down to embedded computers in traffic signals and light posts. As part of a longer term research project, Urban Opus has been working with…

Central to the mission of Urban Opus has been the idea of a citizen centric data brokerage – a means for citizens to take control of their data and manage who uses it and how they use it. A data brokerage works by allowing anybody to make their data available, and then to offer that data to others in a controlled manner. Data brokerage versus open data You hear a lot about open-data in the smart city community, data that…

A city data brokerage is the next step for open data and provides a means for individuals and organisations to publish, buy, sell and trade data. It provides an essential level of trust and control to encourage organizations to make available high value data sets. It also offers a framework in which individuals can begin to share and control access to their personal data. One of the forefront cities in exploring this concept is Copenhagen, who have deployed a trial…

Smart Cities: technology trends (Part 3) Follow @rodgerlea Recently I’ve been asked to write a technology trends paper for the IEEE looking at the main technology trends affecting Smart Cities. This is a broad topic, covering a lot of ground and I’ve been forced to pick a subset of technology trends that are affecting the evolution of smart cities. I’ve broken the topic into manageable sections – each a single blog post – as follows: PART 1 Smart cities: background and…

Smart Cities: technology trends (Part 2) Follow @rodgerlea Recently I’ve been asked to write a technology trends paper for the IEEE looking at the main technology trends affecting Smart Cities. This is a broad topic, covering a lot of ground and I’ve been forced to pick a subset of technology trends that are affecting the evolution of smart cities. I’ve broken the topic into manageable sections – each a single blog post – as follows: PART 1 Smart cities: background and…

Smart Cities: technology trends (Part 1) Follow @rodgerlea Recently I’ve been asked to write a technology trends paper for the IEEE looking at the main technology trends affecting Smart Cities. This is a broad topic, covering a lot of ground and I’ve been forced to pick a subset of technology trends that are affecting the evolution of smart cities. I’ve broken the topic into manageable sections – each a single blog post – as follows: PART 1 (this blog) Smart cities:…

We created a couple of simple visualizations for the Vancouver crime data (open data) There’s a viz showing crime rates from 2003-2016 with an ability to look at specific types of crime for specific years. A second viz shows an interactive visualization of the 2016 crime statistics for Vancouver with a map of the crime’s location. We use Tableau for these visualizations – a full set is available on the Urban Opus tableau page

Take-up of Electric Vehicle Electric vehicles are coming – worldwide growth rates are picking up with China leading the world. However the implications for smart cities, in terms of increased electricity demand, smart grid infrastructure and CO2 abatement are not as simple as you’d think. As shown below (From EV columes.com), global monthly sales are now at 70,000 vehicles. Not a lot compared to global sales of regular cars, but it’s now significant and growing rapidly. …

CKAN is a popular data repository used by many Open Data projects and widely used in a number of Smart Cities. Here in Canada, we use CKAN as part of the Urban Opus data hub. The Urban Opus Smart City hub has been running for over 2 years. The details of its design can be found in the technical paper but it basically consists two core components, CKAN as a document repository and an IoT platform (WoTKit) used for time series data as…

Final report from Canada’s National Research Council (NRC) on the Canadian Smart City Mission to Europe Earlier in the year, we participated in the Canadian Smart City mission to Europe, we blogged about the event here. The Mission was organized by the Candian Research Council (NRC) and they have recently released their official mission report. You can read the full report here: EUREKA Canada Smart Cities Mission April 2016_Mission Report Highlights Mission Objectives Establish new EUREKA projects in Smart Cities…